Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

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Steve Coll

From twice-Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Steve Coll comes Private Empire, winner of the FT/GOLDMAN SACHS BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2012 
 
The oil giant ExxonMobil makes more money annually than the GDP of most countries; has greater sway than US embassies abroad; and spends more on lobbying than any other corporation. Yet to outsiders it is a mystery. In Private Empire, award-winning reporter Steve Coll tells the truth about the world's most powerful and shadowy company. 
 
From the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, via Moscow, the swamps of the Niger Delta and the halls of Congress, he reveals a story of dictators, oligarchs, civil war, blackmail, secrecy and ruthlessness. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and newly declassified documents, this is a chilling portrait of unchecked power. 
 
Reviews: 
 
'Magisterial ... a revealing history of our time' New York Review of Books 
 
'Meticulous, multi-angled and valuable ... Coll's prose sweeps the earth like an Imax camera' Dwight Garner, The New York Times 
 
'Jaw-dropping reading' Kirkus Reviews 
 
'The definitive work on its subject ... at every stop there are vivid anecdotes, sharp insights and telling details' Ed Crooks, Financial Times 
 
About the author: 
 
Steve Coll is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Bin Ladens. He is president of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute headquartered in Washington, D.C., and a staff writer for The New Yorker. He won a Pulitzer prize for explanatory journalism while working at the Washingon Post. He is the author of six other books, including the bestseller Ghost Wars, which won him a second Pulitzer prize. He lives in Washington and New York.

Private Empire

ExxonMobil and American Power

Louai Al Roumani

A STORY OF HOPE, PERSEVERANCE AND RESILIENCE IN THE MIDST OF CHAOS 
 
Louai Al Roumani was head of finance and planning at one of the largest banks in Syria when the war broke out in 2011. 
 
In Lessons from a Warzone, Al Roumani shares his very personal account of coping with the day-to-day realities of leading an organization in dangerous and hostile conditions. His story shows how inspiration can come from the unlikeliest of places, and how a business can not only survive in chaos, but can learn to thrive - the bank became the undisputed sector leader as people's trust in its capability to protect their life-long savings strengthened. 
 
In this book, Al Roumani distils the knowledge and skills he and his colleagues developed while steering the bank through four impossible years into ten lessons applicable to any leader facing a crisis today. His valuable and often counterintuitive advice will help anyone understand how to be resilient even in the most challenging of times.

Lessons from a Warzone

How to be a Resilient Leader in Times of Crisis

Lionel Barber

Gambling Man is the biography of one of the world’s least known but most consequential investors. Japan’s Masayoshi Son has made and lost several fortunes, investing or controlling assets worth $1 trillion in the past two decades through his media-tech giant, SoftBank. He bankrolled Alibaba, China’s internet colossus, before the world had heard about it; plotted with Steve Jobs to turn the iPhone into a wonder product; and financed hundreds of tech start-ups, fuelling the biggest boom Silicon Valley has ever seen.This book takes you on Son’s wild ride, from his birthplace in a Korean slum in post-war Japan to the modern-day temples of power. It speeds through Donald Trump’s golden skyscraper in Manhattan, the royal palaces of Riyadh and the throne rooms of China’s Marxist rulers; all places where Son has deployed his unique blend of financial engineering and crazy risk-taking.Son’s story captures a 25 year-span of hyper-globalisation in which money, technologies and ideas flowed freely. From the launch of the microchip to the advent of artificial intelligence, he has ridden the technological wave which has created extraordinary wealth and economic change. His topsy-turvy business career is testimony to the power of optimism, daring to dream, ever in search of the Next Big Thing.As an ethnic Korean in Japan, Son has overcome adversity and discrimination to become Japan’s best-known businessman and empire-builder but he remains an elusive, intensely private figure. This book, by a former editor of the Financial Times, contains a wealth of new information and has had the co-operation of many of the key participants, including Son himself. Written with a verve appropriate to its subject, Gambling Man reveals the man behind the money, what drives him, why he matters, and what he plans for his next act.

Gambling Man

The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son

Hsiao-Hung Pai

You know the people in this book. 
 
You&rsquo;ll remember the harassed waitress from your local Chinese restaurant. You&rsquo;ve noticed those builders across the street working funny hours and without helmets. You&rsquo;ve eaten the lettuce they picked, or bought the microwave they assembled. The words &lsquo;cockle-pickers&rsquo;, &lsquo;Morecambe Bay&rsquo;, &lsquo;Chinese illegals found dead in lorry&rsquo; will ring a bell. 
 
But did you know that there are hundreds of thousands of undocumented Chinese immigrants in Britain? They&rsquo;ve travelled here because of desperate poverty, and must keep their heads down and work themselves to the bone. 
 
Hsiao-Hung Pai, the only journalist who knows this community, went undercover to hear the stories of this hidden work force. She reveals a scary, shadowy world where human beings are exploited in ways unimaginable in our civilized twenty-first century. 
 
CHINESE WHISPERS exposes the truth behind the lives of a hidden work force here in Britain. You owe it to yourself, and them, to read it.

Chinese Whispers

The True Story Behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour

Michael Lewis

'I asked him how much it would take for him to sell FTX and go do something other than make money. He thought the question over. &quot;One hundred and fifty billion dollars,&quot; he finally said-though he added that he had use for &quot;infinity dollars&quot;...' 
 
Sam Bankman-Fried wasn't just rich. Before he turned thirty he'd become the world's youngest billionaire, making a record fortune in the crypto frenzy. CEOs, celebrities and world leaders vied for his time. At one point he considered paying off the entire national debt of the Bahamas so he could take his business there. 
 
Then it all fell apart. 
 
Who was this Gatsby of the crypto world, a rumpled guy in cargo shorts, whose eyes twitched across TV interviews as he played video games on the side, who even his million-dollar investors still found a mystery? What gave him such an extraordinary ability to make money - and how did his empire collapse so spectacularly? 
 
Michael Lewis was there when it happened, having got to know Bankman-Fried during his epic rise. In Going Infinite he tells us a story like no other, taking us through the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own. Both psychological portrait of a preternaturally gifted 'thinking machine', and wild financial roller-coaster ride, this is a twenty-first-century epic of high-frequency trading and even higher stakes, of crypto mania and insane amounts of money, of hubris and downfall. No one could tell it better.

Going Infinite

The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

Andrew Ross Sorkin

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BBC SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2010 
 
 
They were masters of the financial universe, flying in private jets and raking in billions. They thought they were too big to fail. Yet they would bring the world to its knees. 
 
Andrew Ross Sorkin, the news-breaking New York Times journalist, delivers the first true in-the-room account of the most powerful men and women at the eye of the financial storm - from reviled Lehman Brothers CEO Dick 'the gorilla' Fuld, to banking whiz Jamie Dimon, from bullish Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to AIG's Joseph Cassano, dubbed 'The Man Who Crashed the World'. 
 
Through unprecedented access to the key players, Sorkin meticulously re-creates frantic phone calls, foul-mouthed rows and white-knuckle panic, as Wall Street fought to save itself.

Too Big to Fail

Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street

Daniel Chandler

Despite the enormous problems we face and widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, it's surprisingly hard to find a coherent vision of what a better, fairer society would look like. 
 
Free and Equal provides that vision. In this hugely ambitious and exhilarating debut, philosopher and economist Daniel Chandler argues that the ideas we need are hiding in plain sight, in the work of the twentieth century's greatest political philosopher, John Rawls. Although they have revolutionised philosophy, his ideas have had little impact on politics - until now. Taking Rawls's humane and egalitarian liberalism as his starting point, Chandler builds a careful and ultimately irresistible case for a progressive agenda that would fundamentally reshape our political and economic institutions. 
 
This is a book brimming with hope and possibility - a much-needed alternative to the cynicism that pervades our politics, setting out a 'realistic utopia' that can galvanise people from all walks of life. Free and Equal has the potential not only to transform contemporary debate, but to offer a touchstone for a modern, egalitarian liberalism for many years to come, cementing Rawls's place in political discourse, and firmly establishing Chandler as a vital new voice for our time.

Free and Equal

What Would a Fair Society Look Like?

Julian Hoppit

It has always been an important part of British self-image to see the United Kingdom as an ancient, organic and sensibly managed place, in striking contrast to the convulsions of other European countries. Yet, as Julian Hoppit makes clear in this fascinating and surprising book, beneath the complacent surface the United Kingdom has in fact been in a constant, often very tense argument with itself about how it should be run and, most significantly, who should pay for what. 
 
 The book takes its argument from an eighteenth century cartoon which shows the central state as the 'Dreadful Monster', gorging itself at the dinner table on all the taxes it can grab. Meanwhile the 'Poor Relations' - Scotland, Wales and Ireland, both poor because of tax but also poor in the sense of needing special treatment - are viewed in London as an endless 'drain on the state'. With drastically different levels of prosperity, population, industry, agriculture and accessibility between the United Kingdom's different nations, what is a fair basis for paying for the state?

The Dreadful Monster and its Poor Relations

Taxing, Spending and the United Kingdom, 1707-2021

Niall Ferguson

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot. Call it what you like, it matters now more than ever. In The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is the foundation of all human progress and the lifeblood of history. From the cash injection that funded the Italian Renaissance to the stock market bubble that sparked the French Revolution, from the bonds that fuelled Britain's war effort to the Wall Street Crash and today's meltdown, this is the story of boom and bust as it's never been told before. Whether you're scraping by or rolling in it, there's no better time to understand the ascent of money.

The Ascent of Money

A Financial History of the World

Right now, Europe is in serious financial chaos. In Greece, infrastructure costs mean it would be cheaper to transport all Greek rail passengers by taxi, and hairdressing is classified as arduous for tax avoidance purposes. In Iceland, Range Rovers frequently explode as owners collect the insurance to pay for them. Ireland saw the entire country put up for sale - to itself, while the Germans expected the whole world to behave like them. But the whole world didn't. 
 
In this hilarious, fascinating, timely must-read, Michael Lewis reveals the true natures of the countries caught up in - and exacerbating - our boomerang economies. 
 
'Desperately funny' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Top form' Spectator 
 
'Fascinating' The New York Times 
 
'Hilarious' Irish Independent Review

Boomerang

The Meltdown Tour

Ruchir Sharma

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 
 
'Entertaining, acute and disarmingly honest' Economist 
 
'A vital guide to the new economic order' Rana Foroohar, Time 
 
The crisis of 2008 ended the illusion of a golden era in which many people imagined that prosperity and political calm would continue to spread indefinitely. In a world now racked by slowing growth and mounting unrest, how can we discern which nations will thrive and which will fail? 
 
Shaped by prize-winning author Ruchir Sharma's twenty-five years travelling the world, The Rise and Fall of Nations rethinks economics as a practical art. By narrowing down the thousands of factors that can shape a country's future, it spells out ten clear rules for identifying the next big winners and losers in the global economy. 
 
'The nub of the book is how to spot which countries are likely to succeed, and which to fail, in this impermanent world. Sharma offers a framework of 10 rules. The more of these rules countries achieve, the more they are likely to rise rather than fall ... it may just help you avoid picking losers' David Smith, Sunday Times 
 
'Amazing ... fascinating insights ... quite simply the best guide to the global economy today' Fareed Zakaria 
 
'Lively and informative' Martin Wolf, Financial Times 
 
'As ambitious as it is well executed ... a mix of humble pragmatism and daring decisiveness' Reuters

The Rise and Fall of Nations

Ten Rules of Change in the Post-Crisis World

Steven D. Levitt

Stephen J. Dubner

In this Freak 'how-to' guide, the mavericks behind the Freakonomics phenomenon teach you their secrets: how to challenge conventional wisdom, unravel life's secret codes and think differently - that is, think like a Freak. Levitt and Dubner see the world like no-one else. Now you can too. 
 
'My gut reaction to this life-changing book is "Where have you been all my life?" You will turn pages with delight' Jeffery Taylor, Sunday Express 
 
'Captivating, intellectually robust, funny, surprising and wise. What else can one ask?' Daniel Finkelstein, The Times 
 
 'Illuminating, good fun, endearing, genial ... I was delighted' Philip Roscoe, The Times Higher Education 
 
'It's about how to look at the world, and see the ugly truth ... excellent stuff' William Leith, Spectator 
 
'A phenomenon ... their approach has won them a cult following' Observer

Think Like a Freak

Secrets of the Rogue Economist

John Kenneth Galbraith

&quot;A compelling challenge to conventional thought&quot; New York Times In this newly updated edition of his classic text on the &quot;economics of abundance&quot;, Galbraith lays bare the hazards of individual and social complacency about economic inequality. It is as relevant now, with the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, as when it was first published 40 years ago. Galbraith challenges why we worship work and productivity when so many of the goods we produce are superfluous, and why we grudge spending on public works while ignoring extravagance in the private sector. THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY exemplifies Galbraith's wit, clarity and eloquence of prose.

The Affluent Society

Updated with a New Introduction by the Author

John Lanchester

John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay is the unbelievable true story of the economic crisis. 
 
 We are, to use a technical economic term, screwed. The cowboy capitalists had a party with everyone's money and now we're all paying for it. What went wrong? And will we learn our lesson - or just carry on as before, like celebrating surviving a heart attack with a packet of Rothmans? 
 
 John Lanchester travels with a cast of characters - including reckless banksters, snoozing regulators, complacent politicians, predatory lenders, credit-drunk spendthrifts, and innocent bystanders to understand deeply and genuinely what is happening and why we feel the way we do. 
 
 'Devastatingly funny ... the route map to the crazed world of contemporary finance we have all been waiting for' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Will Self 
 
 'Bang on the money' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Independent 
 
 'Explains the crisis in a way that actually sticks ... to my amazement, I finally grasp it' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Janice Turner, The Times 
 
 'Endlessly witty ... will turn any reader into an expert within the space of 200 pages' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Jonathan Coe 
 
 'Terrific ... there is no better guide to the crazy world of high finance' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;GQ 
 
 John Lanchester is a journalist, novelist and winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award. His fiction includes Mr Philips, The Debt to Pleasure and Capital. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New Yorker, with a monthly column in Esquire.

Whoops!

Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

Noam Chomsky

In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky surveys the threats and prospects of our early twenty-first century. Exploring challenges such as the growing gap between North and South, American exceptionalism (even under Obama), the fiascos of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israeli assault on Gaza and the recent financial bailouts, he also sees hope for the future and a way to move forward - in the so-called democratic wave in Latin America and in the global solidarity movements which suggest 'real progress towards freedom and justice'. 
 
Hopes and Prospects is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the primary challenges still facing the human race and is wondering where to find a ray of hope.

Hopes and Prospects

If you thought Wall Street was about alpha males standing in trading pits hollering at each other, think again. That world is dead. 
 
Now, the world's money is traded by computer code, inside black boxes in heavily guarded buildings. Even the experts entrusted with your cash don't know what's happening to it. And the very few who do aren't about to tell - because they're making a killing. 
 
This is a market that's rigged, out of control and out of sight; a market in which the chief need is for speed; and in which traders would sell their grandmothers for a microsecond. Blink, and you'll miss it. 
 
In Flash Boys, Michael Lewis tells the explosive story of how one group of ingenious oddballs and misfits set out to expose what was going on. It's the story of what it's like to declare war on some of the richest and most powerful people in the world. It's about taking on an entire system. And it's about the madness that has taken hold of the financial markets today. 
 
You won't believe it until you've read it.

Flash Boys

Gillian Tett

'Absolutely brilliant.' Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow 
 
Meet the business anthropologists seeking to explain how we buy, sell, work and think. 
 
From supermarkets to factories, trading floors to tech firms, their methods are revealing the hidden codes that define our lives. 
 
The result is a wholly new way to see human behaviour: anthro-vision. 
 
One of the World's Top 50 Thinkers - Prospect

Anthro-Vision

How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life

From Black Monday to the Asian financial crisis, from the internet bubble to mortgage meltdown, our lives are ruled by crazy cycles of euphoria and hysteria that manage to grip the world but are all-too-soon forgotten. 
 
In this unique collection of articles Michael Lewis - ex-trader and bestselling chronicler of greed and frenzy in the markets - casts a sceptical eye back over the most panicked-about panics of recent decades. He tells a story of boom and bust, deranged greed, outsized egos and over-inflated salaries, where the only thing that can ever be predicted is our constant inability to predict anything. 
 
Using contemporary accounts from commentators such as Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Krugman, plus many of his own best writings, Michael Lewis gives us a completely new insight into how markets really operate - and who really knows what they're talking about.

Panic!

The Story of Modern Financial Insanity

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
'Silicon Valley needed a history lesson and Ferguson has provided it' Eric Schmidt 
 
Most history is about the people at the top of the towers of power. But what if the real action is in the social networks down below, in the town squares? Niall Ferguson, the international bestselling author of Empire, The Ascent of Money and Civilization, brilliantly recasts past and present as an unending contest between hierarchies and networks. 
 
'Provocative, snappy, a rare book ... fasten your seatbelts' Peter Frankopan, Daily Telegraph 
 
'Immensely stimulating, absorbing, illuminating ... sends ideas blazing all over the place ... one of the best popular historians of our time' David Goodhart, Prospect 
 
'Powerful, fast-paced ... a pull-yourself-together warning to the present by way of arresting historical precedent' Andrew Anthony, Guardian 
 
'Captivating and compelling' Jonathan A. Knee, The New York Times

The Square and the Tower

Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power

Robert L  Heilbroner

The final revision of this classic bestseller, the 7th edition defines the common thread linking the world's greatest economic thinkers and explores the philosophies that motivate them. Hailed by Galbraith as a &quot;brilliant achievement&quot;, The Worldly Philosophers with over 2 million copies sold worldwide, not only enables us to see more deeply into our history, but helps us to better understand our own times. Heilbroner provides the new theme that connects thinkers as different as Adam Smith andKarl Marx: the desire to understand how a capitalist society works. A new chapter conveys a concern that today's increasingly &quot;scientific&quot; economics may overlook fundamental social and political issues that are central to economics.

The Worldly Philosophers

The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

'Really made me think about how I think' - Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West 
 
Tough times don't last. Tough people do. 
 
In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. Here Taleb stands uncer&shy;tainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resil&shy;ient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. 
 
Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. 
 
Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb's message is revolutionary: the antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. 
 
'The hottest thinker in the world' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

Antifragile

Things that Gain from Disorder

Joseph E. Stiglitz

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of Globalization and Its Discontents comes a corruscating analysis of the boom and bust of the 1990s - how and why it happened, how the seeds of destruction were sown in the midst of apparent prosperity, and how America and the world are still failing to learn the lessons from what went wrong. 
 
The Roaring Nineties is in part the story of how the corrupt and greedy got their comeuppance. But Stiglitz also develops a convinving alternative to the free-market mantra. He shows why greed is not good and how if left unchecked it leads to deceptions, distortions and disasters. He argues that achieving the right balance between government and the market is the best way towards sustained growth and efficiency, and that both companies and economies must to some extent be regulated by trust and consideration for others. This isn't just good morality - it's good economics too.

The Roaring Nineties

Why We're Paying the Price for the Greediest Decade in History

Sebastian Mallaby

From an award-winning financial historian comes the gripping, character-driven story of venture capital and the world it made 
 
Innovations rarely come from "experts." Jeff Bezos was not a bookseller; Elon Musk was not in the auto industry. When it comes to innovation, a legendary venture capitalist told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered. Most attempts at discovery fail, but a few succeed at such a scale that they more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives venture capital, Silicon Valley, the tech sector, and, by extension, the world. 
 
Drawing on unprecedented access to the most celebrated venture capitalists of all time, award-winning financial historian Sebastian Mallaby tells the story of this strange tribe of financiers who have funded the world's most successful companies, from Google to SpaceX to Alibaba. With a riveting blend of storytelling and analysis, The Power Law makes sense of the seeming randomness of success in venture capital, an industry that relies, for good and ill, on gut instinct and personality rather than spreadsheets and data. We learn the unvarnished truth about some of the most iconic triumphs and infamous disasters in the history of tech, from the comedy of errors that was the birth of Apple to the venture funding that fostered hubris at WeWork and Uber to the industry's notorious lack of women and ethnic minorities. 
 
Now the power law echoes around the world: it has transformed China's digital economy beyond recognition, and London is one of the top cities for venture capital investment. By taking us so deeply into the VCs' game, The Power Law helps us think about our own future through their eyes.

The Power Law

Venture Capital and the Art of Disruption

Philip Coggan

What happens in the City has never affected us more 
 
In this excellent guide, now fully revised and updated, leading financial journalist Philip Coggan cuts through the headlines, the scandals and the jargon to explain the nuts and bolts of the financial system. 
What causes the pound to rise or interest rates to fall? Which are the institutions that really matter? Why is it we need the Money Machine - and what happens when it crashes? Coggan provides clear and concise answers and shows why we should all be more familiar with a system we so intimately depend upon.

The Money Machine

How the City Works

Why don't flight attendants get tipped? If you were a terrorist, how would you attack? And why does KFC always run out of fried chicken? 
 
Over the past decade, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have published more than 8,000 blog posts on Freakonomics.com. Now the very best of this writing has been carefully curated into one volume, the perfect solution for the millions of readers who love all things Freakonomics.

When to Rob a Bank

A Rogue Economist's Guide to the World

Nathaniel Popper

Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 
 
A New York Times technology and business reporter charts the dramatic rise of Bitcoin and the fascinating personalities who are striving to create a new global money for the Internet age. 
 
Digital Gold is New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper's brilliant and engrossing history of Bitcoin, the landmark digital money and financial technology that has spawned a global social movement. 
 
The notion of a new currency, maintained by the computers of users around the world, has been the butt of many jokes, but that has not stopped it from growing into a technology worth billions of dollars, supported by the hordes of followers who have come to view it as the most important new idea since the creation of the Internet. Believers from Beijing to Buenos Aires see the potential for a financial system free from banks and governments. More than just a tech industry fad, Bitcoin has threatened to decentralize some of society's most basic institutions. 
 
An unusual tale of group invention, Digital Gold charts the rise of the Bitcoin technology through the eyes of the movement's colorful central characters, including an Argentinian millionaire, a Chinese entrepreneur, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and Bitcoin's elusive creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Already, Bitcoin has led to untold riches for some, and prison terms for others.

Digital Gold

The Untold Story of Bitcoin

David Edgerton

Out of a liberal, capitalist, genuinely global power of a unique kind, there arose from the 1940s a distinct British nation. This nation was committed to internal change, making it much more like the great continental powers. From the 1970s it became bound up both with the European Union and with foreign capital in new ways. David Edgerton's fascinating perspective produces refreshed understanding of everything from the nature of British politics to the performance of British industry. 
 
Packed with surprising examples and arguments, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation gives us a grown-up, unsentimental history, one which is crucial at a moment of serious reconsideration for the country and its future.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation

A Twentieth-Century History

Philip Augar

'A brilliantly readable account, based on exceptional access, of the transformation of the old Quaker bank into a hard-charging capitalist adventurer ... both a thriller and a reminder that business is fascinating because all human life is there' John Plender, Financial Times 
 
Based on unparalleled access to those involved, and told with compelling pace and drama, The Bank that Lived a Little describes three decades of boardroom intrigue at one of Britain's biggest financial institutions. In a tale of feuds, grandiose dreams and a struggle for supremacy between rival strategies and their adherents, Philip Augar gives a riveting account of Barclays' journey from an old Quaker bank to a full-throttle capitalist machine. The disagreement between those ambitious for Barclays to join the top table of global banks, and those preferring a smaller domestic role more in keeping with the bank's traditions, cost three chief executives their jobs and continues to divide opinion within Barclays, the City and beyond. 
 
This is an extraordinary corporate thriller, which among much else describes how Barclays came to buy Lehman Brothers for a bargain price in 2008, why it was so keen to avoid taking government funding during the financial crisis, and the price shareholders have paid for a decade of barely controlled ambition. But Augar also shows how Barclays' experiences are a paradigm for Britain's social and economic life over thirty years, which saw the City move from the edge of the economy to its very centre. These decades created unprecedented prosperity for a tiny number, and made the reputations of governments and individuals but then left many of them in tatters. 
 
The leveraged society, the winner-takes-all mentality and our present era of austerity can all be traced to the influence of banks such as Barclays. Augar's book tells this rollercoaster story from the perspective of many of its participants - and also of those affected by the grip they came to have on Britain.

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